When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled. Whenever someone would tear down the flag, owner Laura Carleton would raise another one.
But after someone complained about the flag on Friday, the encounter turned deadly.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Carleton, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Community members have since rallied around Carleton’s store, placing Pride flags, flowers, candles and photos of Carleton in front of it. Matthew Clevenger of Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ said Carleton was a strong ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“She was a fierce protector of everybody being who they wanted to be,” Clevenger told The Washington Post.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website. After graduating from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Carleton worked at a retail store before joining Kenneth Cole in the 1980s. Carleton worked for the fashion company for more than 15 years as an executive.
In 2013, Carleton founded her clothing store, Mag.pi, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Calif. She added a second store in Cedar Glen in 2021. While she built her career, Carleton married her husband and took pride in their blended family of nine children, her store’s website says.
Carleton was one of the largest donors to Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ and attended the organization’s Pride boat parade in June, Clevenger said. A section of Mag.pi was dedicated to rainbow-colored products, and she displayed rainbow candles by the cash register, he said.
Carleton helped create a culture in which the LGBTQ+ community felt accepted, Clevenger said. But some community members were still resistant, he added, and took down Mag.pi’s Pride flag multiple times.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department. He was holding a handgun when deputies found him on a nearby road, where he later died, officials said.
This is not just a LGBT issue of bigotry but also a fucked Americans with guns issue.
I can’t imagine this happening in Canada even though we have dickheads here too
Yeah. BOTH parties died, and the cops have yet to explain what happened in their encounter with the shooter.
Like, obviously the shooter was a murderer and a bigot. But was he a threat to the cops? I’d feel a lot better if they said something (or maybe that’s just not being reported by the news sources I’ve seen?)
No one deserves to be killed. Even bigots and murderers have that right.
There are a lot of great things about this country, but the gun violence rate is fucked.
He was holding a handgun when they found him and he probably didn’t drop it or waved it at them. I agree with you in principle.
Sorry, but I disagree. Any piece of shit that hates others so much that they will kill because of It- needs to be put down like the animal they are. They deserve no mercy and need to be removed from the population.
But I don’t trust cops. They don’t deserve that power. They’ll use it in cases we won’t agree with.
It is this type of morality that drove him to do what he did. Life is not just a commodity you can just throw away. Instead of trying to bury the problem with more violence, try and sort it by educating the kids better in this area.
Resisting this feeling, of hating them beyond human decency like they do to us, is the only thing that makes us better than them. We both fight for what we claim is morality. But the bigots do so with hate, so we must fight with love and empathy - deliver justice to them, but restrain the kind of unbridled, animalistic hate they let free. This is the only way to show that we are better - treating them as human, while they call us subhuman.
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[Comment removed. My philosophy has changed and I no longer support the kind of Socratic virtue argument I used here.]
committing hate crimes against them is no better.
No one is advocating committing hate crimes against anybody. You are purposefully strawmanning other people so you can manipulate them into adopting your way of thinking, and I am not gonna let you do it.
You’re a prick.
And the hate crimes and genocide are exactly the hate I was referring too.
This clown is motte-and-baileying himself by claiming he meant hate crimes when he was clearly talking about, and says outright, feeling hate in his previous posts.
He was not talking about hate crimes. He was talking about feeling hate and is purposefully conflating the two so he can motte-and-bailey himself out of admitting he is wrong.
That means this guy has an agenda, and is very likely a Nazi apologist.
Everybody do not listen to him or people like him.
I checked a couple of their comments on other stuff, they love Nietzsche and think child labor laws are a bad thing. Yea this person is 100% a Nazi apologist, or maybe just a straight up Nazi pretending to be a centrist
I am not a Nazi apologist like you claim, and I see now that we are clearly beyond the point of reasoning with the intolerant bigots - they must be removed by force as you’re saying. I agree with your points. We’re fighting the same fight, just in different ways - and I never attempted to formulate a strawman fallacy (although your ad hominem is nearly as repulsive). I agree with your method now, I was simply trying to find a way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed where clearly there is no way.
Sorry I made you feel so insulted by my argument as to make those points against me. I concede.
Resisting this feeling, of hating them beyond human decency like they do to us, is the only thing that makes us better than them.
Morality isn’t about being better than others. You are a child. Grow the fuck up
You are still a better person than them if you hate them.
They hate us because of made up bullshit culture wars.
We hate them because they want us and people we care about dead.
These are in no way equal. I hate every single one of these people.
You’re a better person because you hate them if anything
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Nah, we can be better than them and still take joy in bad things happening to them :3
Thanks for the downvotes libs! Stay mad that people don’t like fascists as much as you
Hey! We found a tankie!
Your username certainly checks out
That’s true only tankies are allowed to hate Nazis
/s fuck tankies, what the heck kind of take is that? “you hate literal fascists that means you like Stalin” ???
Well, Stalin was a fascist. And Tankies like to call everyone who doesn’t 100% agree with their radical views as fascists and like to throw out “lib” like it’s a slur to anyone they’re arguing with. I’m just making an educated guess here.
IMO, death is too-good for anyone who deserves to be killed. It’s an easy out.
But in answer to your question, I’m not surprised. Somebody who crosses the line in a rage is less likely to just give up without a fight. Somebody being a confrontational, hateful asshole who picks that fight and then kills someone is more likely to be like “welp I’m fucked, might as well go out shooting.” They may even believe that they’ve got some kind of moral high ground, although such a belief is more likely a justification in their own heads.
IMO, death is too-good for anyone who deserves to be killed. It’s an easy out.
Like that’s gonna help the victim at all
It happened in New Zealand?
Not everything is about you and your pet political causes. Let us mourn that poor fucking woman in peace.
It turns out something can have multiple causes. A rising wave of bigotry and easy access to firearms can both contribute to someone being shot.
The Republican party needs to be forcibly dissolved, or this will keep happening.
Unfortunately, liberals would rather shove their heads in the sand and keep trying to play nice with these fascists.
I believe people have the right to be who they are as long as it isn’t hurting others, but Intolerance should be met with intolerance, nothing less will do.
I have been screaming this for a long time now. As a memeber of the LGBTQ Community, we cannot tolerate the intolerant, even if we are called islamophobic, religiousphobic or whatever. We cannot let these assholes take away our rights. It already started in Italy and it will keep spreading if we keep tolerating these assholes.
What are we supposed to do? Seriously.
Congress is a logjam in both chambers.
The military would split if you tried to force red states to stop being shitty.
Most of our top weapons are in those red states.
So what’s the solution that doesn’t lead to half the country dead?
Plus, on the world stage, a “United” United States protects countries like Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, etc. What happens when we’re gone? China becomes dominant and just starts enslaving people in the lands it takes? The Saudis take over parts of the world and bring their shittiness with them? Russia fucks up more of Eastern Europe?
So what’s the answer here to some really complex questions?
Contrary to what people believe, the US military has a fairly good cross sectional representation of the American populace. It is most certainly not right wing. I’ve known more than a few active duty military members and actually most were moderate to liberal on the political spectrum. And fairly intelligent.
Yeah, it’s a good cross section, but that still means there are a LOT of neo-Confederates in the military. A new civil war would be devastating.
So like, what happens when one side gets a hold of nukes?
That’s what I’m worried about and why I reject these calls from super-leftists for a new civil war. Do you want NYC, LA, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Portland nuked? Because that’s what happens when the hillbillies in Iowa and the Dakotas get their hands on the nukes that are stored there.
We’ve built the most powerful military the world has ever seen, along with the most powerful single weapon, and guys like the one I initially responded to just want to go ahead and shatter that with a civil war where the neo-Confederates WILL use that against Blue cities.
Why are you only rejecting the “super-leftists” and not the right wing who are carrying out evil acts and actually openly calling for civil war, and have been declaring we’ve been in a civil war for years?
Don’t you dare use my words to try to serve some political agenda.
Man, reading comprehension is NOT your strong suit, is it?
I’m this thread, I was responding to another leftist calling for, as he put it, “R E V O L U T I O N”.
Of course I’m also against shitty neo-Confederates ALSO calling for a civil war, but you already knew that, didn’t you, you condescending little sealioning fuckhead? Instead, you need to turn this into yet more whatabiutism.
I don’t want a new civil war. It’s that easy. If one starts, I simply don’t see a way that it doesn’t turn devastating and nuclear. Calling for a revolution is dumb: our military will likely split, and then two sides of the same super powerful weaponry are fighting in my homeland. No thanks!
Heh. One of my favourite pasttimes is TTRPGing, and one of the settings I made to explore my disdain for the hard-right was a setting that featured the destruction of San Francisco by nuclear weapons by Conservatives. I could totally see a ‘Christian States of America’ nuking a liberal city…
Don’t get me hard, the annihilattion of America AND a few degrees off off global warming? I like this.
Honestly, vote. They think they can act like this because of Trump giving them the go ahead. Move the Overton window.
I’d guarantee you and bet that the military is overwhelmingly in favor of supporting the left should it come to it.
Otherwise, they’d have to admit that they stand against the entire purpose and cause of the military.
I just don’t see that happening. Either I have too much faith in the intelligence of our armed forces, or I’m wrong, but this is how I see it going down.
I agree that most of the military would favor the Union again, but there’s a significant enough amount of neo-Confederates that it would cause BIG problems.
Your country does just as much damage on a global scale as those you’ve mentioned as the bad guys. Please don’t forget that.
Yeah, but I’d generally take our shittiness over Saudi or Russian shittiness. As a note, my family escaped Russia when the Bolsheviks took over, so I’m HIGHLY biased there.
China… I’m not sure about. I studied Chinese history in college, but that was 20 years ago so I kind of stopped paying deep attention around the time of Hu Jintao. Xi seems much more forceful and willing to expand China’s power via dominance and enslavement.
There are no GOOD superpowers, but I think the US is the least bad.
I do kind of agree, but let’s not forget to all our shittiness in Latin America. Here’s a top 10.
Yeah, we screwed up Latin America terribly and are dealing with the consequences now.
Still: I’d take it over the other superpowers.
We have to stop playing within the system
I honestly thought I was on lemmy.ml. I didn’t realize I was amidst liberal redditors, but I’ll spell it out for you.
R E V O L U T I O N
We can’t fix the current system.
And again, what do you do about the consequences of those actions?
Revolution? Do you know where B-2 bombers are based? How about B-52s? Where are most of our young troops sent to train? All three: The South.
You want revolution, but have no plan for it.
Eventually a Thermidorian Reaction will crush the neofascists. Hopefully soon.
Liberals are spineless cowards, we have to fight back. The fascists gave us permission to use deadly force and self-defense the moment they use deadly force against us
So what? You become a one party nation? How about maybe, now this will sound crazy, but fixing the validity of 3rd party parties might help.
First Past the Post voting is an issue that could help make 3rd parties valid.(edit: if we got rid of it)
Until then, a 3rd party is literally fantasy.
Just go to proportional representation, FPTP is crap in otherways. Actually everyone would be chuffed if the electoral collage just went away, the bar is not that high.
Yeah, I meant that we need to get rid of FPTP.
And I agree, nuke the fucking electoral college.
I did not think what you had could be called FPTP though? Other countries have more then 2 parties and FPTP but between the collage and borked rules in the US basically make them impossible.
What the US has is FPTP. We need ranked choice or something else that permits 3rd parties to be viable.
As well as eradicating the electoral college.
It was news to me, we where always taught the US had the electoral collage system.
I say fuck representative government. We as people, all of us, are flawed. And no matter who we elect, they will at some point, use the power or voice we’ve entrusted them with to their own ends and for their own means. We need Digital Direct Democracy. It’s time to end the notion that society needs elected representation to act as wranglers and moderate our opinion. The technology is here and honestly I think it’s a system that the founders would have been behind.
Sure, I mean that would be great but looking at where the US is right this min maybe the focus should be just a touch lower.
The reason we got fucked over is a LACK of representation. We started a fucking revolution because we were so heavily taxed by a foreign power.
Maybe you want to move into a different direction where all are somehow involved in lawakong, but that’d be a huge clusterfuck.
Imagine 330,000,000+ individual policies…
You need things spelled out for you? We could form a leftist party since we currently don’t have one, ya dingus.
Yes, that would be a 3rd party.
And how is that accomplished without extreme violence?
Who said without?
Two things, basic morals and the rules.
So the unidentified shooter was a Republican? Quit your BS.
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
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Nothing quite like murdering somebody over the fucking light spectrum.
Not just a light spectrum! A symbol of freedom to be yourself, too. While I certainly agree they don’t like colors, they also definitely don’t like people being comfortable in their own skin
Biblically, it’s also the symbol that God won’t wipe us all off the face of the Earth with another flood.
Rainbows in 1973: Nice album cover, man.
Rainbows in 2023: Won’t somebody think of the children!
How many normal people will we allow conservatives to kill before we act? History has shown that an infestation of conservatism cannot be cured by pacifism.
The war conservatives insist on waging against normal people will look exactly like this story. Conservative murders normal person in act of terrorism.
Do your part to train and prepare. You don’t have to be a fighter to help others. Learn to evac wounded and administer trauma first aid. Teach others. Do your part.
It’s definitely going that direction, and with no one willing to do what it takes to shut them down, America is destined to end up in another civil war.
Of course, I’ve no doubt it’ll be over quickly and the conservative party will be abolished- it’ll still result in an unnecessary loss of a lot of lives.
What an embarrassment america has become.
There is nothing conservative about radical rightwing authoritarianism. They are fascists.
There’s no reclaiming the label “conservative”. We lost it. We need a new brand.
How about what an American Conservative is supposed to be conserving, what the parts of the world with a vaguely educated population calls them:
Liberal.
Well no. Conservative, to me, means a federal government that’s pretty much powerless to change anything in the States (10th amendment), that doesn’t invade the privacy of Americans (4th amendment), and that doesn’t go around waging war without declaration.
That’s not what we have. That’s not what either conservatives or liberals want, so we need a new label.
That’s liberalism. You just don’t know what it means.
It’s classical liberalism, but the meaning of the word “liberal” has changed.
I’m not really interested in whatever Newspeak the people actively attacking democracy, education, and our Constitutional rights push, be they Reagan-type neoliberals or modern “conservatives” who sure do use a lot of dogwhistles they hope decent people are too clueless by design to hear until it’s too late.
When someone tells you they hate socialists and they’re definitely not a liberal, connect the dots.
Tbh in most of the civilized world ‘liberal’ is not a compliment. American brought tankies, wokies and liberals to the worldwide left, and that is NOT something to be celebrated (or maybe as the CIA’s best psyop)
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You’re allowed to disagree. This man wasn’t killed by police because he disagreed with the shop owner having a rainbow flag. They killed him because he murdered her and (presumably) didn’t surrender when they caught up to him.
I think what you’re talking about is the rest of us calling out your bigotry. That’s not oppression or control by the government. That’s society leaving you and your outdated beliefs behind.
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Insane Logic
They want to be treated like human beings. Nothing insane about that.
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And won??? So there’s not a current moment to ban books talking about LGBTQ people? There’s not a “don’t say gay” bill in Florida? There’s not people attacking trans kids and adults and making it illegal for them to get healthcare? Phew. I was so worried about all those things.
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That flag was coming right for him, he had to stand his ground
“Well, you know. You’ll just be sitting there, minding your own business, and they’ll come marching in, and crawl up your leg, and start biting the inside of your ass, and you’ll be all like, ‘Hey! Get out of my ass you stupid rainbows!’”
Conservatives and being murderers. Goes together like bread and butter.
I’m not saying this to cast doubt on anything, I believe the reason given for the attack, I’m simply curious (probably because I used to be a first responder). One thing I haven’t seen explained in the articles I’ve read about this story is how do we know that he assaulted her for the flag and then shot her? Who called 911? How did they know who the suspect was?
The most plausible explanation to me is she was still alive when the cops got there but died before the paramedics were able to transport her, so she was able to tell them something, since no witnesses were mentioned. Second most plausible is there were witnesses.
Craziest exception to the hearsay rule is the dying declaration.
Wasn’t she killed in her store? Virtually every store these days has security cameras. As for who called 911, guns are loud. Unless you’re in the middle of nowhere, there will be people who hear the gun shot, even if they don’t see what happened.
Yes but I thought I read somewhere that the shooter was confronted soon after (a couple hours?) which would be very fast to find and go through security footage. And yes about the gun, but that wouldn’t necessarily get them the motive and description of the suspect. It doesn’t really matter to me that much anyway, it was just an unknown aspect of a story I am interested in.
Having a security camera doesn’t mean their monitored off-site. A lot(maybe most) of the time they aren’t. But agreed that guns are loud.
“I’m not questioning the reason for the attack but how do we know that’s the reason.”
It’s acceptable to question sources. This story is definitely likely true, but there also plenty of cases of stuff written online(and what police say) being untrue and it’s okay to probe it a little.
I agree, but with the amount of trolling some people do regarding LGBT stuff I wanted to be very clear I’m not one of them. Since every article is stating it as fact and not using “alleged” I assume the journalists know with some certainty, but I haven’t seen it detailed anywhere.
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Sounds like America
In most cases I believe in people getting a fair trial, but in this case I’m glad he was killed by police at the scene. Fuck the piece a of shit.
Why not give hime a life of regret, sitting behind bars for ever, knowing he thrown his life an freedome away because of a flag. Revange isn’t the solution and killing people makes as as bad as them.
You’re making a huge assumption that the guy would regret what he did… I doubt someone who would kill over a pride flag would have the mental capacity necessary for honest self reflection.
He would have 10 hours a day to think for the rest of his life. We all changed over time. Not saying i know who he could become, just saying that some people change by 180°.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department.
Law enforcement departments in multiple states, including Maryland, California and New York, have investigated recent instances of Pride flag vandalism as hate crimes.
The original article contains 579 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Speaking of hanging things, I’ve got a suggestion as to what should be done to the murderer…
You mean the dude who the police already killed?
They could still hang him, just to be sure! Put his corpse in a rainbow shirt and let him dangle in place of the flag he tore down.
This kind of stuff makes me so angry. Like if I allowed my anger to run rampant and I had the ability to do these things my imagination would cause me to do some of the most horrendous things to this guy.
Stuff a couple of rainbow colored bad dragons into his orifices, perform srs on his corpse, put him out for free use to any interested necrophiliacs, and then grind up whatever is left of his body after 2 weeks and invite any interested satanists to desecrate and deconsecrate his corpse and consign his soul to Satan and then chunk the pieces into the ocean as fish bait and video the whole thing (keeping the identities of our friendly neighborhood necrophiliacs safe) and post the video to liveleaks.
Then for safe measure I would troll any sites where people are talking about this and encouraging the actions of the guy and I would hunt them down and do the exact same goddamn thing to them.
You murdered someone because they had a flag you didn’t like in their fucking window. The fuck.
You can’t even blame it on your religion because like your religion says “you shall not kill”, it never mentions shit about a fucking flag, so the one good thing about you having the religion assuming this person was religiously motivated at all is that they violated the primary commandment that their God told them not to violate.
So it’s not like they’re not going to hell when they died anyway.
Sorry, I’m going to go and like get some therapy or something I’m just unreasonably angry right now. I’m neither trans nor gay I’m just absolutely sick of hatred.
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I don’t think it’s a good idea to go back to 1956 Budapest
Is being LGBT political? It’s a sad story but I don’t understand why is posted in the politics community.
She wasn’t LGBTQ+. She engaged in political activism and was murdered, more or less, for that activism.
Thanks for the clarification. Also, why does everyone hate my comment? I didn’t mean to offend anyone, and I support the LGBT movement.
Being LGBT is now political. Politicians are literally debating weather LGBT people should have rights.
…. Because right wing shit bags made it political.
Ban LGBQT books.
Ban LGBQT healthcare.
Ban drag shows.
Ban everything that isn’t white conservative Christian.
And then if they succeed in that then what? Did they win? Do they take their ball and go home? It’s not like the world was all hunky-dory in the fifties. There’s no golden age to go back to.
And then if they succeed in that then what?
Then they move on to the next entry in the “then they came for” list.
Okay but at that point only white Christian nationalists are left.
Like what are they going to do take the 18 million people left in America and wage war on the rest of the planet?
They would get annihilated, which now that I think about it is probably the amazing hidden backstory behind Big hero 6. Welcome to San Fran Tokyo
Okay but at that point only white Christian nationalists are left.
Yup, and then they decide to start in on Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Quakers, and Catholics.
Like what are they going to do take the 18 million people left in America and wage war on the rest of the planet?
Probably, yeah. When they have rid the country of those they consider to be undesirable and it hasn’t solved all of society’s problems like they said it would, they can either admit that they committed genocide for no reason or start looking abroad for new monsters to blame shit on and then slay.
They would get annihilated,
Yeah, there’s one little wrinkle in that outlook. Fascism does really short-sighted stupid shit at the end when it gets desperate, and has no regard for human life, and they would have access to the US nuclear arsenal.
The wealthy people pushing this will just find some new novelity, the rest habe no concept of a future.
A lot of countries have historically legislated religion, does that make being religious a political act? I don’t think so. Same with this. Don’t let people co-opt something that you and doesn’t effect others and let them make you a villain or a martyr because of it.
You don’t realize that there’s an ongoing global movement for queer rights, and an ongoing backlash that often plays out in the realm of politics.
Ok, I know there’s a whole movement and everything. I know some people can make it political. I guess that’s how it made it here.
If you don’t think mass movements for human rights are “political,” what do you think “political” means? I’m seriously asking. Do you not think civil rights marches were political, either? I do not understand.
Sorry for the late response. I thought politics were about the people in charged off making rules. Clearly, no one ever explicitly told me the definition of the word. I guessed the word based off of where it was used like a lot of other words.
Gotcha. There’s a concerted effort to make “political” a dirty word. I’m sorry if you were really just unaware.
…it shouldn’t be, but has been made so. This article is right where it belongs
Yes, killing someone for hanging a pride flag is a political act.
Supporting LGBT+ people apparently is, along with a bunch of other things I’d consider ‘basic human decency’ thanks to the right wing in this country going absolutely bugfuck the last decade and change.
I can’t think of any links to flags and politics.
Lmfao finding the edge of the political spectrum isn’t as easy as it seems.
I’ve seen someone make driving cars political lmao
I was wondering what the defense would come up with.
Is this defensive? I was questioning the placement of the story, not supporting the shooting. I am 100% pro-LGBTQ, and I don’t know how it came across any other way.
How is an act of terrorism not political?
Fair
